Reconsidering the Public Consequences of Private Inequality: How Women in Unequal Marriages are More Susceptible to Anti-Gender Egalitarian Elite Cues

Nearly 25 years ago Burns, Schlozman, and Verba made one of the first empirical attempts to test the contention that ‘because women are unequal at home, they cannot be equal in the polity’. Despite some normative implications that flow from this view, however, this argument has not been the subject of further systematic empirical test. In this study, we build on their work to identify the heterogeneous effect of patriarchal elite messages on women in equal and unequal marriages in an authoritarian polity. Drawing on an original population-based survey experiment conducted face-to-face with 2,736 respondents from 155 neighborhoods in Turkey, we show that women in unequal marriages, namely, those who are less educated and much younger than their partners, and those who are in arranged marriages, are far more likely to be influenced by inegalitarian elite cues regarding women’s role in social and political life.